NCAA Hypocritical in Stance on Gambling

The NCAA will tell you that college students are in trouble. On campuses across the country, they are subject to a dangerous gambling culture.

Student bookies, gamblers and fixers are everywhere, knowing just how to tap into a poor victim. So college athletes can find themselves in trouble, and asked to shave points or throw games for money. It's not just a sports issue regarding the integrity of games, but also the NCAA will tell you it's a human issue.

So it's no shock, really, to see the point-shaving scandal at Toledo.

We've seen them in campuses everywhere, from Boston College to Northwestern, from Arizona State to Fresno State. From Maryland to Toledo. Big, small, east, west, north, south.

The FBI has been looking into point-shaving allegations at Toledo for at least four years. It now alleges that former running back Adam Cuomo, with the help of a Detroit-area gambler in 2003, recruited teammates to take part in a point-shaving scheme over a three-year period. He also is said to have recruited basketball players to fix Toledo hoops games.

Years ago, the NCAA started talking tough about the scourge of gambling. And years later, it's still talking, talking, talking, even putting up occasional fliers. At the same time, the latest trend at colleges across the country is to sell ads to casinos and place them in stadiums.

So the NCAA will tell you that kids are getting hurt from a gambling environment, but at the same time NCAA schools are in business with the gamblers.

Right side of mouth, meet left side. This is the NCAA's little con, arguing one point for the good of humanity and profiting from the opposite side.

How does this work? I asked Rachel Newman Baker, the NCAAs gambling czar, who passed my request onto a spokesperson, who answered this way in an email:

"Our position on sports wagering has not softened at all; we continue to be stridently opposed to any type of sports wagering. You are not likely to find anyone in the membership who doesn't agree.

"But we have come to understand that there are different perspectives within the membership about commercial activities, including the appropriateness of accepting casino advertising. What some institutions may see as acceptable, other may not. This is an evolving process.

"The NCAA does not interfere in the financial relationships/agreements of its institutions, as long as they do not violate NCAA legislation."

I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to call BS here. The NCAA is notorious for this type of doublespeak, a crafty way, basically, of blowing smoke when no legitimate explanation exists.

So the NCAA makes a moral argument, but then polices its morals with economics.

There is money to be made, so ethics are gone?

These are the people educating our kids.

Murray Sperber, a professor at University of California, Berkeley, who has written several books on the excesses of the NCAA, talks about the uncomfortable relationship the NCAA has with gambling.

"A huge part of the NCAA Tournament is the gambling, the office pools, or much-larger pools that [former Washington football coach] Rick Neuheisel was in. Because of gambling, they get good ratings. Who would watch first-round games if, in fact, gambling were outlawed on college basketball. What would happen to the $6 billion they get from CBS?

"At the very core of the NCAA, the mother's milk they live on, the March Madness money, is this deep, deep hypocrisy. I remember their own poll showed that one in five athletes had bet on college sports.

"Should they encourage gambling? Especially when one of the problem groups of gamblers, people who can't control their gambling, are college kids? They get in over their heads."

Meanwhile, last year, the University of New Mexico took $2.5 million for a five-year deal that made the Route 66 Casino Hotel its "exclusive gaming sponsor."

Whatever that means.

"Corporate sponsorships," UNM president David Schmidly said at the time, "are very important to the future growth and success of our athletic department."

Those vulnerable college students the NCAA will tell you about? Not as important.

Some schools have played sporting events in casinos.

And seven of the Pac-10 Conference's 10 schools take casino or lottery advertising, according to the Oregonian, Portland's newspaper. How prevalent is this nationally?

"I would say there are more schools that do have them now than don't," Tim Roberts, president of Oregon Sports Network, part owner of the University of Oregon's media rights, told the paper.

And here comes another problem with gambling and college sports, this time at Toledo.

Yet the NCAA tries to have it all ways at once. It did the same thing with the American Indian mascot issue, saying such images were "hostile and abusive," and basically forcing schools, such as Illinois, to drop the symbol. Meanwhile, Florida State got to keep its hostile and abusive image because it had a financial agreement with the tribe.

Is it hostile and abusive or not? The NCAA will tell you it is.

Look, if the NCAA doesn't care about gambling, then it should stop pretending.

But the guardian of your standards has to be your heart and your conscience. If gambling is hurting college students, then the relationship to gambling has to be cut. It's simple. And it doesn't matter what that does to the NCAA Tournament, or to a university's "financial relationships/agreements."